“I understand, St. George, that you could have stopped that disgraceful affair the other night if you had raised your hand,” Judge Pancoast had blurted out in an angry tone at the club the week following. “I did raise it, judge,” replied St. George, calmly drawing off his gloves. “They don't say so--they say you stood by and encouraged it.” “Quite true,” he answered in his dryest voice. “When I raised my hand it was to drop my handkerchief. They fired as it fell.” “And a barbarous and altogether foolish piece of business, Temple. There is no justification for that sort of thing, and if Rutter wasn't a feudal king up in his own county there would be trouble over it. It's God's mercy the poor fellow wasn't killed. Fine beginning, isn't it, for a happy married life?” “Better not have any wife at all, judge, than wed a woman whose good name you are afraid to defend with your life. There are some of us who can stand anything but that, and Harry is built along the same lines. A fine, noble, young fellow--did just right and has my entire confidence and my love. Think it over, judge,” and he strolled into the card-room, picked up the morning paper, and buried his face in its columns, his teeth set, his face aflame with suppressed disgust at the kind of blood running in the judge's veins. The colonel's treatment of his son also came in for heated discussion. Mrs. Cheston was particularly outspoken. Such quixotic action on the ground of safeguarding the rights of a young drunkard like Willits, who didn't know when he had had enough, might very well do for a self-appointed autocrat like Rutter, she maintained, but some equally respectable people would have him know that they disagreed with him. “Just like Talbot Rutter,” she exclaimed in her outspoken, decided way--“no sense of proportion. High-tempered, obstinate as a mule, and a hundred years--yes, five hundred years behind his time. And he--could have stopped it all too if he had listened to me. Did you ever hear anything so stupid as his turning Harry--the sweetest boy who ever lived--out of doors, and in a pouring rain, for doing what he would have done himself! Oh, this is too ridiculous--too farcical. Why, you can't conceive of the absurdity of it all--nobody can! Gilbert was there and told me every word of it. You would have thought he was a grand duke or a pasha punishing a slave--and the funniest thing about it is that he believes he is a pasha. Oh--I have no patience with such contemptible family pride, and that's what is at the bottom of it.” Some of the back county aristocrats, on the other hand--men who lived by themselves, who took their cue from Alexander Hamilton, Lee, and Webb, and believed in the code as the only means of arbitrating a difficulty of any kind between gentlemen--stoutly defended the Lord of Moorlands.